lence has been true of most black writers; only eleven in the hundred years since 1850 have published novels more than twice.
*
|
There is a prevalent silence I pass by quickly, the absence of creativity where it once had been; the ceasing to create literature, though the books may keep coming out year after year. That suicide of the creative process Hemingway described so accurately in ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro":
|
 | | He had destroyed his talent himselfby not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.
|
No, not Scott Fitzgerald. His not a death of creativity, not silence, but what happens when (his words) there is "the sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value."
|
Almost unnoted are the foreground silences,
before
the achievement. (Remember when Emerson hailed Whitman's genius, he guessed correctly: "which yet must have had a long
foreground
for such a start.") George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, A. E. Coppard, Angus Wilson, Joyce Caryall close to, or in their forties before they became published writers; Lampedusa, Maria Dermout
(The Ten Thousand Things),
Laura Ingalls Wilder, the "children's writer," in their sixties.
**
Their capacities evident early in the "being one on whom nothing is lost"; in other writers' qualities. Not all struggling and anguished, like Anderson, the foreground years; some needing the immobilization of long illness or loss, or the sudden lifting of responsibility to make writing necessary, make writing possible; others waiting circumstances and encouragement (George Eliot, her Henry Lewes; Laura Wil-
|
| | * Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, 1958.
|
| | **Some other foreground silences: Elizabeth (Mrs.) Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Cora Sandel, Cyrus Colter, Hortense Calisher.
|
|
